On Venice Beach: A Photo Essay
Meyerson, Harold & Trumbo, Mitzi
There are fewer and fewer places to be poor in the city of America's future. Walk down any residential street on the periphery of downtown; it teems with immigrant families doubling and tripling...
...Not even the merchants of Venice could turn a buck on the homeless...
...In the face of widespread community resistance, however, these attempts collapsed...
...In its wake, the homeless returned to the doorways and the spaces under highways and bridges where they dwell when the state and the weather and a gentrified counterculture force their dispersal...
...But concentrated transient poverty was something else again...
...homeless, whose numbers nobody knows, but which academic surveys suggest fall between 55,000 and 70,000...
...Counterculture or no, Venice was no sanctuary—better than Tucson, perhaps, half a dozen of the homeless concluded one afternoon, but no San Francisco...
...A few days after these pictures were taken and two days before the announced police sweep, the encampment was demolished by a vicious winter storm...
...Chased by a downtown merchants' association from the familiar alleys of Skid Row, a number of Los Angeles's homeless gathered this winter on Venice Beach, which they had reason to believe would be friendlier terrain...
...Venice has seen deviance SPRING • 1988 • 157 PHOTO ESSAY turned to profit too often to dismiss mere social disorganization out of hand...
...When Mitzi Trumbo took these pictures on Venice Beach in mid-January 1988, the police had already given notice that they would soon uproot the encampment...
...conditions like that are mushrooming today...
...q 158 • DISSENT PHOTO ESSAY SPRING • 1988 • 159...
...A big notch beneath even the garage people are the L.A...
...and even in its currently gentrified condition it remains the commercial proving ground for all manner of life-styles and fads...
...it teems with immigrant families doubling and tripling up in small apartments...
...A small band of Venice progressives sought to establish shelters within the community, and Venice's newly elected city council representative, one of the first veterans of the 1960s New Left to sit on the Los Angeles City Council, proposed housing the homeless in nearby trailers...
...Venice, after all, was the nearest thing Los Angeles has ever had to a Bohemian community...
...Fully half of them, the surveys tell us, are homeless primarily because of economic circumstance...
...A Los Angeles Times survey last year found 200,000 persons throughout the county residing in garages in the backs of homes and apartments, invariably without running water, frequently without electricity...
...Stuff they used to find in the rural South some twenty or thirty years ago," a housing planner told a local magazine recently...
...Long at odds with the Los Angeles Police, Venice found itself in the unaccustomed position of calling on the cops to clear the homeless from its doorstep...
...there was no place in Venice's calculated funkiness for genuine squalor...
Vol. 35 • April 1988 • No. 2
